The Most Merciful Thing in the World
by Moriabbey
Summary: Dipper thinks he's found something- something bigger than even the journal was. But he may come to find that some knowledge is better left to the dark...


Twigs and undergrowth crunched beneath Dipper's feet as he trod through the quiet forest. Behind him, he could hear the sound of Mabel doing the same, mixed with an occasional exaggerated sigh.

"C'mon, Mabel, at least have a good attitude about coming out here," Dipper said.

"But Candy and Grenda are both back at the Shack," Mabel said, her voice whining like a broken vacuum cleaner.

"This'll take ten minutes at most," Dipper replied. "We'll be back before you know it.

"That's what you said twenty minutes ago! These woods aren't even that big- how have you managed to get lost in here?"

Dipper ignored the question. He pulled the journal out from under his arm, opened it, and looked back up at the forest.

"I don't get it," he whispered, almost to himself. "I've been to this tree twice, it really shouldn't be this hard to find."

Mabel groaned."So you ARE lost! Do you even know where you're trying to go?"

Dipper stopped cold and turned, his expression one of grave offense.

"I- I explained it to you, like, three times!"

"I was with my friends! Why on Earth did you expect that I would be listening?"

Dipper muttered something and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Alright," he said. "You remember how we figured out that a lot of the journal is written in invisible ink?"

"Yeah- right before we killed a bunch of zombies with karaoke!"

"Yes. Right. Anyway, I was looking through the journal earlier today, and on the page after the diagram of the author's tree-bunker, I found this."

He held the journal out to Mabel.

"'Floating eyeballs?'" she read skeptically. "Didn't the author decide those were fake?"

"Oh, wait, wrong page!" Dipper pulled the journal back, leafed through it for a moment, and stuck it back in front of Mabel, a finger on the part he wanted to point out.

"Scientia illicita sub commentario habitat," she read out, her voice halting on the unfamiliar words. "Woah. Is that, like, Esperanto or something?"

"Uh, no, actually, that's Latin." Dipper tucked the journal back under his arm. "So I tried running it through Google Translate, which, of course, was no help- it gave me 'knowledge unlawful under commentary dwells.' But then I spent two hours with a Latin-English dictionary, and I'm pretty sure what it actually means is 'forbidden knowledge dwells beneath the journal.'"

"I dunno, Dipper. Isn't Bill enough forbidden knowledge for one summer?"

"C'mon, there can't be any harm in just reading whatever it is," Dipper said. "Where's your sense of adventure?"

"I would've thought you'd lost yours after you made a deal with Bill and he stole your body."

"Well… Okay, so, the author seems to be trying to keep this even more cryptic than the rest of the journal, right?"

Mabel nodded.

"So, I figure that whatever it is, it must be more dangerous than anything else in the journal- including Bill. So, if it is more dangerous than he is, then maybe we can use it to fight him!"

"… Dipper, that's a tenuous leap of logic at best. And that's coming from the person who tried to debug a computer by spraying Raid on the motherboard when she was six."

"I still haven't forgiven you for that, by the way. Besides, Mabel, if it really is a chant to some eldritch god that even Bill fears, I'm not going to just randomly start reading it."

"That's assuming you can even find it- and that there is actually something hidden where you first found the journal."

"Oh, right. Lost." Dipper looked up at the trees surrounding them. "Look, just help me find the tree the journal was hidden at and we can go back to the Mystery Shack."

"Fine," Mabel replied. "But first you have to promise: no chants to eldritch gods."

"I promise."

"No demonic invocations, either, or raising the dead again."

"Alright, I guess, if you really-"

"No arcane rune divinations, no Faustian trades, no pacts with beings who've slumbered since before the Earth was new-"

"Okay, that's enough. Let's go."

"Aha!" Dipper exclaimed. "I think this is it- that tree has a lever-shaped branch near the top."

Mabel stood up from her investigation of an interesting log to look.

"Yeah, that looks like the tree the bunker was hidden under," she decided. "So where exactly did you find the journal?"

"It was in a box hidden under the ground…" he thought out loud. "And I think it was opened by a switch somewhere in the tree."

He walked up to the tree, rapped a knuckle against it with a metallic clang, and walked a slow circle around it. Eventually, he found a seam in the painted metal and pulled it open with a CREEEEEEEAK. Inside was what looked like a box with a TV screen, several dials, an antenna and two switches attached to it. Dipper gingerly flicked the rightmost switch.

Behind him was a momentary sound of hydraulics, like a spaceship door opening. He turned and saw a gap in the ground behind him, a rectangular scar on the greenery.

From where Dipper stood, he could see the metal walls of the container, but the bottom was just out of his view. He took a few steps towards it and knelt on the grass, sticking his head forward over the opening.

The depression was lined with metal on all sides, but the bottom was a wooden panel, covered with dust and cobwebs, with a rectangular clearing where the journal had once laid.

Dipper reached to the far side of the wood panel, stuck his fingers under the edge and slowly levered it up. Once the edge had cleared the top of the recession, he grabbed it with both hands and placed it off to the side. Beneath it was another sheet of metal, identical to those on the edges but for a lack of dirt, and on top of that was a loose sheaf of papers.

The first sheet was divided into two parts. The top half was covered with scrawled notes in a hand Dipper hadn't seen in the journal. The bottom half was a diagram- a seven-pointed star inscribed in a circle, the lines seeming thick at first glance but a tangle of innumerable hair-thin strokes on further inspection, a tracery of ink weaving a thousand minuscule images into one great-

Dipper shook his head and looked away from the paper. His thoughts seemed to snap back to reality from some alien realm.

"Bro?" Mabel asked quietly. Dipper turned to see her looking at him with concern, and realized she was kneeling beside him with a hand on his shoulder. Somehow he hadn't noticed.

"I…"

Dipper's voice trailed off as his gaze tracked back down to the sheaf of papers. His eyes started to resolve the images in the lines again, and he shoved a hand in front of the diagram before the maddening picture could suck his thoughts in again.

"I'm fine."

Ignoring his sister's increasingly worried expression, Dipper set the top sheet aside (face-down) and started looking through the rest of the sheaf. Most of the other papers were in a similar vein- some kind of anatomical diagram of a creature that was only vaguely humanoid, a star chart for skies not of this world, a diagram of the solar system with alchemical symbols in place of the planets and a score of blood-red lines leading to the third orb from the center…

Dipper stopped on an oddity, a pencil drawing. It was of a hand, the fingers outstretched and the palm facing the viewer. It was incredibly detailed- he might have taken it for a photograph at first glance, were it not for a red-brown smudge on the wrist. But that wasn't the most striking thing about the image. That honor would have to go to what was on the palm- a carving of a twisted, five-pointed star, a crude flame and a few lines suggesting an eye in its center. Like the rest of the picture, the wound looked visceral enough to touch. Dipper half-imagined he could smell the wounded flesh, the metallic odor of seeping blood…

He shook his head and discarded the paper, trying to force down a mounting feeling of dread. He heard the aged paper crinkle as Mabel picked it up, followed by a noise of vague disgust.

"What even is this?" she asked. "This looks like something you'd draw on Smile Dip."

Dipper shook his head, one hand over his mouth.

"I don't know," he said. "None of this looks like anything I've ever seen in the journal."

He stayed there, kneeling, for a moment, then picked up the first paper and held it out at arm's length, just far enough away that he couldn't make out the alien pattern of the diagram. He tried to focus on the text instead, but at this distance the cramped scribblings were almost impossible to make out.

He brought the paper closer and covered the diagram with one hand. Now the words were legible, but only barely- the writing looked rushed, and Dipper didn't think it was English.

"Vires… noctis… infinitae," he read slowly.

Silence fell over the forest like a cloud of noxious gas, smothering and invisible. The noises of the forest, the birds and the small woodland creatures, cut off, leaving a dark gulf of noise in their place.

"Vos… appello vocoque mandoque!"

The words were coming easier now, louder and more confident. Somewhere in the back of his mind, something whispered for him to stop, but it was pushed aside by a flow of something from beyond.

The words seized themselves and began to pull their way out of his throat. Dipper felt his body grow distant, like the last time he'd been possessed, but now instead of being shoved out into space he could feel himself receding… elsewhere. Not up or down, sideways, forwards or backwards, but along a dimension perpendicular to all others, through a door locked to the sane.

The world blurred and spun, his own distant body the axis of rotation. The browns, greens and blues surrounding him spun into shades richer than any imaginable before spiraling into non-existence, his own vision incapable of comprehending them. He felt the Earth receding as ancient sentences continued to bubble forth from his throat, all sensation and thought fading before the alien onslaught pouring into him-

The flow suddenly stopped, the rushed back out in a blinding instant. He snapped back into his own body and the distant flesh became bindings, holding him to the spot and taking him from the freedom of the alien drift.

The words stopped as the foreign presence fled him and his lungs swelled until he thought they would burst. His chest contracted and expanded almost with a mind of its own, but this, at least, was a mind of his body, if not HIS mind- it was no visitor from beyond the shell of mortal ken.

As the frantic exhalations became coughs, harsh things drenched in phlegm, his other sensations began to return and he heard Mabel's voice screaming his name like a wolf howling at a packmate caught in a trap.

"I'm okay!" he managed to get out in the space between coughs. "I'm fine. I'm alright."

"What is the ONE thing I asked you not to do, Dipper?" Mabel screamed. "The ONE SPECIFIC thing?"

She seized him, warm arms enveloping him. He felt a sticky warmth on his neck where she buried her head.

"Oh, God, you scared me," she whispered.

Dipper returned his sister's embrace, his grasp tighter even than her vice-like grip.

"I'm alright," he repeated in a whisper. "Oh, God…"

The papers were gone from Dipper's grasp- pulled away by Mabel, he guessed, scattered at the ground beneath him. His gaze fell on them even as Mabel held him close.

She saw his distraction, and took a moment to carefully turn the sheaf of papers face-down. As she turned back to him, Dipper could see the fear scarred in her eyes, the places where she'd seen something Other touch the world she knew.

"Let's never speak of this ever again," she said, her voice still shaking. Dipper nodded.

"Let's do that."


End file.
